Telstra Outage May Have Been Caused By A Lightning Strike

Damaged cable

Preliminary reports have emerged suggesting that lightning may be to blame for a nationwide Telstra issue that prevented people from being able to contact emergency services.

A cut cable was discovered at 2.05am this morning east of Orange, and despite the cable being repaired several hours later, there remained intermittent interruptions into the morning.

There remain some disruptions in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.

There are also reports that the outage affected traffic lights in Victoria, with VicRoads confirming that the hundreds of affected lights are now operating again, but may be out of their normal sequencing.

This could cause flow-on traffic delays.

Meanwhile, Telstra has tweeted a photo of the cable pit, where it is believed there was "significant fire damage consistent with lightning strike".